You might think there's never a great time to play a championship contender like the Milwaukee Bucks. After weeks of scuffling along, losing five of six games, followed by gritty win over a middling team in Minnesota missing key players, a national TV game against Giannis Antetokounmpo might seem like a tough task.
It turns out it was just what Boston needed.
“I really think so,” Al Horford said of the Bucks game being good timing for the Celtics. “It’s one of the top teams in our league and we had to bring that type of effort because if not, they will embarrass you.”
Whatever was happening over the past couple of weeks, it all vanished on Christmas. The Celtics had no choice but to be fully invested in every little detail against Milwaukee because they easily could have been on the other end of a blowout.
“We've had a bit of a rough stretch over the last couple weeks. We dropped some games, had some guys in and out of the lineup, haven't shot the ball great,” Jaylen Brown said. “To come out here tonight, everyone is watching, holiday spirit, good energy, I think it's the perfect place to shake everything off and come out and play some good basketball.”
The Celtics may have spent the morning singing all they want for Christmas is to hit some threes (the guys in the green locker room at TD Garden all still have their two front teeth), but it wasn’t Santa delivering the shooting touch they had been missing. They worked to generate good looks, assisting on all but four of their 19 3-pointers.
On the NBA’s first truly big stage of the season, the Celtics spent time doing the little things that got big results. They spent time doing the things they’d stopped doing since the last time they played an ABC game in Golden State.
“It's one of those wins that allows you to get back on track,” Grant Williams said. “I feel like it's one of those wins that allows you to understand that was just a little stretch even more, because you weren't panicked or anything. You were comfortable with moving forward. But having a win like this where you play well, and you can look each other in the eye and feel like you competed to the highest degree against a team as talented as you are, you feel good about it.”
And such is the delicate balance of this team. They are fresh off a stretch that may ultimately be a blip in the season; something that draws a chuckle in June when someone says “hey remember when people were worried about us in December?” But this game was also a prime example of what the Celtics need to do to be the team that laughs a stretch like that off. It’s a reminder that greatness comes with effort, instead of relying on sheer talent to carry the day.
“We never forgot, but it did feel good to kind of get back to playing the way we know how to play,” Jayson Tatum said. “We have the emotional understanding of it’s a long season, and there’s going to be great stretches and there’s going to be some bad ones. It’s just kind of not letting the bad ones snowball effect, and get back on track sooner rather than later.”
We all tend to get down when we see a team play poorly for an extended period of time, especially one that has had familiar stretches of poor play in the past. It’s easy to get caught up in that and lose sight of a bigger picture.
They have, in recent games, shown bits and pieces of enough emotional intelligence to shake off bad basketball. They did it against the Lakers and won. They did it against the Pacers and still lost. They did it against Minnesota and pulled away.
The results have not all been good, but the Celtics have been steadfast that within the losses have been nuggets of positivity; that despite what movies and high school coaches say, losses over the course of a season are not an all or nothing proposition.
“I thought it was more important to see how we reacted when things didn't go our way,” Joe Mazzulla said. “I thought we handled success well early in the season, and I thought we've handled the rut we were in during that season. I think it's just more about that. Who are we when things are going our way? Who are we when they're not? How do we stay poised, how do we stay level-headed and how do we focus on the things that make us a great team, and get back to those as fast as we can."
In the immediacy of the losses, they all felt bad. Pull out a little and we might see that forcing a team which started out gangbusters to face some adversity and figure out how to fight back might not have been such a bad thing. Doing that in December is a whole lot better than trying to figure it out in April.
They took a big second quarter punch from the Bucks on Christmas Day and they responded with a huge third quarter run. They slipped to start the fourth quarter and immediately found a way, without forcing anything, to answer and even build on their lead. They didn’t let anything get away from them like they had been. They kept their heads and pressed on.
“I think that’s just a sign that we do have a really good team, in all honesty,” Tatum said. “We’re not perfect, nobody is, and we’re going to have some bad moments, some tough games, and that’s fine. There’s nothing that you can change about those games, it’s all about how do you respond. It’s something we talk about all the time, how do you respond from half to half or game to game. I think that is a key sign of a really good team, just how do you bounce back, how do you respond moving forward.”